3hd 2022: Life, the Universe, and Everything

About

Participating artists: 33 (Billy Bultheel & Alexander Iezzi), Agnieszka Polska, Alice Bucknell, AUCO, BABYNYMPH, DJ Plead, Evita Manji, Flora Yin Wong, George Henry Longly, Holly Childs & Gediminas Žygus, Iceboy Violet, Jana Rush, JAZSALYN, Josèfa Ntjam, Juliana Huxtable, Katja Novitskova, Kianí del Valle, Lito Kattou, Monica Mirabile, Omsk Social Club & Joey Holder, Prison Religion, Rat Section, Safety Trance, Shuang Li, Slim Soledad, Sofia Moreno, Suutoo, Tianzhuo Chen

“It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in.” 

Announcing the eighth edition of Creamcake’s annual 3hd Festival, which will run at various locations across Berlin, from October 20 to 29. This year’s program takes its title from Douglas Adams’s 1978 comedy science fiction franchise—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2)—and considers The Ultimate Question of “Life, the Universe, and Everything.” A spectrum of invited artists, performers, musicians, and DJs will probe our boundless sense of identity, belonging, and existence, within the equally limitless notion of “space”—in all its physical, conceptual, and linguistic forms—sharing their perspectives on ideas of utopia and dystopia, nature and humanity, the universe and the metaverse, and beyond.

The ten-day interdisciplinary festival, and nearly month-long extended program that runs to November 21, responds to the idea of “space” and its multiple, ungraspable meanings. As ecological crises become more tangible, billionaires leave on tours of the cosmos, evoking an imaginary of extraterrestrial colonization as a techno-fix to climate disaster. At the same time, in domestic, public and club spaces, our presence in these environments feels forever altered after the pandemic. We feel on one end more fragmented into the local, separated from the peak globalism of before, yet on the other, a blurring of online and offline space has confused our notions of world-making.

“Space”—reads the introduction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’s titular imaginary travel book—“is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.”